In the Russian winter of 1878 a shy, aristocratic young woman named Vera Zasulich walked into the office of the governor of St. Petersburg, pulled a revolver from underneath her shawl, and shot General Fedor Trepov point blank. "Revenge!" she cried, for the governor's brutal treatment of a political prisoner. Her trial for murder later that year became an international sensation. Dostoyevsky (who attended the trial), Turgenev, Engels, and even Oscar Wilde all wrote about her extraordinary case. Her astonishing acquittal was celebrated across Europe, and her influence can be traced to a series of acts that collectively became part of "the age of assassinations." Ana Siljak captures Vera's extraordinary life story while colorfully evoking the drama of one of the world's most closely watched trials and a Russia where political celebrities held sway.

"Angel of Vengeance has tremendous narrative drive, combined with an epic, Tolstoyan scope.... Pre-revolutionary Russia's contradictions, its freedoms and constraints, are superbly drawn. Such deftness is rare in an academic historian. So too is the author's sense of humour. Angel of Vengeance is a very good book."—Globe and Mail (Toronto)